Every Amazon wishlist now has an associated RSS feed, as you can see in the picture at right. You can access the RSS via the standard orange button.
The generated RSS makes use of Microsoft's new Simple List Extensions.When used with an SLE-aware browser or news reader, these extensions allow the wishlist items to be easily numbered, sorted and filtered. The newest beta of IE7 includes complete support for SLE and these wishlists look great inside.
One very cool aspect of these wishlists is that they are built using ECS, and that you can use the same technique to build something very similar (or totally different). Take apart a wishlist URL, and you will see that it consists of a call to ECS, including a reference to an XSLT style sheet developed by Amazon. This style sheet takes the normal ECS output and generates the RSS, complete with the extra tags needed to support the Simple List Extensions.
Update: Watch Amazon's Drew Herdener discuss and demo this cool new feature.
-- Jeff;




I recently went live with a similar AWS site. RSStalker.com generates RSS feed for individual products or entire wishlists. The feed is updated whenever the price changes on an item.
Posted by: Matt Curry | March 21, 2006 at 07:13 AM
Oh dear... I got all excited then, only to discover that what you actually mean is every Amazon wishlist *on the US site* now has an associated RSS feed. :-(
Coming soon to the other Amazon sites?
Posted by: Simon Whitaker | March 21, 2006 at 10:39 AM
So obviously this is a bit old but I was excited to give it a try. Unfortunately, I hit a few errors.
(1) Apparently you don't get to see the RSS icon for your own feeds, which is silly but maybe the shortsighted assumption is that you don't want to mess w/ your own lists.
(2) Once I logged out I was able to see an RSS feed for my 1 public list (obviously doesn't solve accessing the private one) but _it only lists 10 items_ .... That's pretty useless for someone like me with way more then 10 entries.
I'm sure there's some more frustrations (or something else I'm missing) but I'm wondering where is Amazon's API for this!!?
Posted by: Jay | October 11, 2008 at 03:27 PM